Here’s a walkthrough of the creation of a custom wallpaper featuring a mystical warrior angel.

Started off by using this picture of Allessandra Ambrosio at a Victoria’s Secret show. It’s amazing how little we are going to add to her to make her look like a fantasy character. Who needs practical protection, right?

Her face is a little too candid so I clipped out a proffesional shoot head and pasted it on. It’s a little too big at the moment.

The first thing done to the new head was some color correction. Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation

Now some value adjustment in Brightness/Contrast.

Ctrl+T to transform and scale her noggin down a bit.

Then the eraser tool was used with a lightened pressure to blend the top hair with the hair from the original pic.

I found these pieces of leg armor to put on her.

I selected the greave on the left and Edit>Transform>Flip Horizontal to help match her leg position better. Colors were adjusted and the Smudge Tool helped blend. Also copied the top trim to fatten the other side a bit to make the proportions match up a bit better.

Cut out a spear and slapped it on her back. Amazing how little armor she needs in battle, no?

I found this background from the game, Aion, the inspiration for this wallpaper, then simply dropped it behind the flattened angel warrior.

The angel layer was then double-clicked to bring up the Layer Styles. Outer Glow was chosen as was a bright pinkish-purple color.

The eraser was used to brush away the wings a bit to give it a slight translucency.

Here are some settings placed on a 2pt brush to create a scatter effect that painted the magic particles around her. You can open this by toggling on the Brush Pallette.

A layer was created behind her and above the background to brush in the particles. You can have some fun by going above and below the subject on different layers. Have fun with it.

Since the metal on her shin guards is reflective, it was blended in a bit more by drawing selections with the Lasso Tool. The dark blue-green grass color was brushed in, then the particle brush was used with a bright green color selected and painted in to mimic the light on the ground.

To make the light shafts I made a new layer on the top and drew white blobs of paint.

A radial blur was used with these settings to create the bright white light effect.

Click to Enlarge

And here she is, ready for the bedroom, I mean the battlefield!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 11:29 am and is filed under Fonts, Photo Manip, Photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.